You can find the revised GIS Information at Geographic Information Systems
From the Eprints support list, I found a link to an excellent paper by Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox of Virginia Tech (hussein, fox)@vt.edu. Titled "A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries" ISSN 1082-9873, it outlines a powerful approach to building and extending digital libraries even while standards evolve and demand grows rapidly. Here is an abstract:
Digital Libraries (DLs) have traditionally been positioned at the intersection of library science, computer science, and networked information systems. The different underlying philosophies of these three fields has had an unsettling influence on the development of DLs.
While library science is fairly mature, networked information systems are constantly evolving to keep pace with Internet innovation. DLs are thus expected to demonstrate the careful management of libraries while supporting standards that evolve at an astonishing pace. This architectural moving target is a predicament that all DLs face sooner or later in their lifecycle, and one that few manage to deal with effectively.
To exacerbate this problem, there has been a general desire for systems to be interoperable at the levels of data exchange and service collaboration. Such interoperability requirements necessitated the development of standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). These standards have achieved a degree of success in the DL community largely because of their generality and simplicity.
Informed by those lessons, this project is an attempt to consistently extend known interoperability standards to form the basis of a framework of components for building extensible DLs.
I recommend this for everyone's consideration. Read it at D-Lib Magazine, Volume 7 Number 12.
THE CERN Document Server Software (CDSware) is the software developed by, maintained by, and used at, the CERN Document Server. It allows you to run your own electronic preprint server, your own online library catalogue or a document system on the web. It complies with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH) and uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic standard.
Read and download from CERN's CDSware site.
BBC and the Library of Congress are getting into digital libraries in a very big way. BBC is planning to make all of their archives available free on the Internet, and plan to use an advanced form of Person To Person (P2P) communications to cope with the huge bandwidth required. Those of us who have watched the BBC know of the high quality and world wide coverage of the BBC, which goes back for many years. Real history at your fingertips.
Next year the Library of Congress will be the host site for the Moving Images Collection, which is currently being built by a coalition of three universities. It will be supported by IBM p-series servers and will be a substantial addition to the 7.5 million items currently on line. My reaction to both of these is Wow! These will each be incredible resources.
Read more about the BBC at NewMediaZero, and about the Library of Congress collection at Open-Mag (free registration) and a press release at Rutgers University, project lead.
The National Institutes of Health have annunced the development of a Molecular Library, yet another digital library, that will provide base information for development new drugs and nano-scale agents for an emerging "era of personalized medicine."
The library will act as a repository "for some of the hundreds of thousands of molecules the pharmaceutical industry screens for their use in identifying target agents that could be used to track or treat diseases," Pettigrew said. "There's a huge effort at NIH to accelerate the development of [these] agents," he added.
[EP-underground] Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 13:57:43 +0100 (BST)
From: Stevan Harnad [harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk]
Reply-To: EPrints Underground List [eprints-underground@ecs.soton.ac.uk]
To: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org,
boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk
CC: SPARC-IR@arl.org Newsgroups: bionet.journals.note
It is becoming apparent that our main challenge is not creating institutional repositories, but creating policies and incentives for filling them.
Universities' "publish or perish" policies are intended to encourage and reward researchers for doing research and for making their findings public to all would-be users. It is a natural extension of "publish or perish" to encourage and reward researchers for maximizing the impact of their research output by maximizing would-be user access to it.
An article on how this can be done through national and university research accessibility and assessability policies (with the UK as a model) will appear in THES Friday, June 6. It will be a condensed version of the following short article:
"Enhance UK research impact and assessment by making the RAE webmetric" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html
The institutional-repository movement would also benefit greatly from clearly separating the 5 quasi-independent aims that currently constitute its very mixed agenda. All 5 aims are worthwhile and important, but only the first is urgent, and it is the heart of the challenge for filling institutional with university research output for the sake of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it:
The 5 distinct aims for institutional repositories
As long as we keep blurring or mixing these 5 distinct aims, the first and by far the most pressing of them -- the filling of university eprint archives with all university research output, pre- and post-peer-review, in order to maximize its impact through open access -- will be needlessly delayed (and so will any eventual relief from the university serials budget crisis).
Perhaps the two most counterproductive of the conflations among these five distinct aims has been that between I and III (research self-archiving, RES, and digital preservation, PRES) and that between I and V (research self-archiving, RES, and electronic publication, EPUB).
The RES/PRES mix-up, much discussed in the American Scientist Forum, can easily be seen to be a needless and misleading conflation when we recall that insofar as the peer-reviewed research literature is concerned, the current preservation burden is on its primary corpus, which is the published literature (online and on paper). The much-needed filling of university research-output archives is a supplement to this primary corpus, for the purpose of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it; it is not a substitute for it. It is simply a mistake and a needless retardant on the filling of the university to imply that there are preservation problems to solve before they can be filled.
The RES/EPUB mix-up is really two mixups. The first is the conflation of self-archiving with self-publishing: The urgent archive-filling challenge, RES, concerns the self-archiving of peer-reviewed, published research output. Again, it is a supplement to publication, for the purpose of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it; it is not a substitute for it. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4
The second RES/EPUB mix-up has to do with university e-publishing ambitions (perhaps along the lines of High-Wire Press-wannabes!). It is fine to have these ambitions, but they should not be conflated in any way with the completely independent and urgent aim of self-archiving the university's peer-reviewed, published research output. Most of this is discussed in the thread: "EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html
This is also the source of the slowness in archive-filling lamented by Michael Day in the article below. The remedy, again, is clearly distinguishing RES from any other institutional repository aims, and drafting national and institutional research self-archiving policies and incentives, as soon and as systematically as possible.
Michael Day, Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom, a paper from the ePrints UK project. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/
Abstract: "This study introduces ePrints UK, a project funded as part of the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. It first introduces the project and the main features of the FAIR programme as it relates to e-print repositories. Then it provides some general information on open-access principles, institutional repositories and the technical developments that have made their development viable. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/
There follows a review of relevant repositories in the UK and an indication of what impact ePrints UK might have in supporting learning, teaching and research. This is followed by a discussion of perceived impediments to the take-up of institutional repositories, including both practical and cultural issues. A final section investigates the development of ongoing evaluation criteria for the project." Source: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
See: "Enhance UK research impact and assessment by making the RAE webmetric" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html
Stevan Harnad
Subject: [OAI-general] DSpace 1.1 Released
From: "Tansley, Robert" [robert.tansley@hp.com]
To: oai-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu,
oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
We are pleased to announce the availibilty of the new 1.1 release of DSpace. This release contains many new features, among them advanced search capabilities, improved unicode handling, and OAI-PMH resumption token support. Also numerous bugs identified since the previous release have been fixed, and the documentation has been updated.
You may download the code and documentation from the DSpace page at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace
Be sure to get the updated documentation, since it describes the upgrade procedure that must be performed for the new release to operate on existing DSpace installations. Please report any problems to the sourceforge mail list: dspace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net
We would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of the DSpace community in reporting bugs, release testing, and supporting other adopters, as well as the excellent work from HP Labs and MIT developers in improving the DSpace platform.
Robert Tansley / Hewlett-Packard Laboratories / (+1) 617 551 7624
From "Lisa M. Spiro" lspiro@rice.edu [OAI General Mailing List]
An impressive range of tutorials will be offered at the 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will take place in Houston, Texas on May 27-31. Tutorials will cover compelling topics such as usability testing, XML & XSL, SRW, geospatial and AV digital libraries, open content licenses, and the Open Archives Initiative, and are given by experts in the field. For more information or to register, please see the conference web site at http://www.rice.edu/jcdl03/
Please note that the deadline for advanced registration for JCDL has been extended to Friday, May 2. One may register for a tutorial without registering for the conference. A complete listing of tutorials appears below.
Full Day Tutorials, May 27, 2003
Morning Tutorials, May 27, 2003
Afternoon Tutorials, May 27, 2003
Full-Day Tutorial, May 31, 2003
Audio/Video Digital Libraries: designing, searching for documents, and generating Metadata [Giuseppe Amato, Claudio Gennaro & Pasquale Savino]
Morning Tutorial, May 31, 2003
SRW (Search Retrieve WebService): Z39.50 Next Generation [Matthew J. Dovey, Robert Sanderson, Ralph LeVan]
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:24:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael Nelson
To: oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
I missed this on my first read of the most
recent D-Lib Magazine. I'm including this
in case others missed it as well:
The Internet Archive OAI-PMH Implementation
Contributed by: Jonathan Aizen Web Engineer
Internet Archive San Francisco, California,
USA In an effort to participate and exchange
information with other digital libraries
and research groups, the Internet Archive,
Jonathan has implemented the Open Archives
Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH), . Here is the base URL for the repository.
Coda: Music. A passage of more or less independent character introduced after the completion of the essential parts of a movement, so as to form a more definite and satisfactory conclusion. -- Oxford English Dictionary
Caltech CODA uses the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Archives in production are registered as OAI Data Providers. As registered Data Providers, they may participate in federated searching interfaces and other end user services offered by a growing number of OAI Service Providers. Several OAI Service Providers are listed below.
Caltech CODA runs on freely available electronic archiving software. The Caltech ETD collection runs on ETD-db software developed at Virginia Tech; all other collections run on EPrints software developed at the University of Southampton.
O A I - R e l a t e d U t i l i t i e s
This page contains links to tools implemented by members of the Open Archives Initiative community. These tools are made available free of charge and without guarantee as to their correctness. Questions about each tool should be directed to the individual implementer.
This announcement is from the OAI General mailing list (oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu)
The Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Sources (NKOS) Ad Hoc Working Group (http://nkos.slis.kent.edu) will hold its 6th annual workshop on May 31 at the Alice Pratt Brown Hall of Rice University in Houston TX in conjunction with the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (www.jcdl.org).
This year's workshop, "Building a Meaningful Web," will focus on the transformation of traditional controlled vocabulary approaches, such as authority lists and thesauri, to new forms of knowledge representation such as ontologies, topic maps, and semantic web components, where relationships between concepts are richer and more extensive and the requirements of computer processing are met. The session will include discussion of the contribution of best practices from more traditional approaches to the design of new knowledge organization systems.
The goal is to bring these often disparate communities together so that the newer efforts of KOS development can take advantage of the best practices of more traditional systems and the standards for traditional KOS structures can benefit from the technological advances being developed to support improved semantic access to web content. Topics include:
The format will consist of invited and volunteered short presentations and plenty of discussion. In addition participants will be given the opportunity to introduce their work and their interests briefly during the workshop introduction.
More detail about the program is available at the NKOS web site at http://nkos.slis.kent.edu.
Registration information is available from the JCDL web site (www.jcdl.org). Early registration ends on April 25. Discounts are available for IEEE, ACM and ASIST members.
3 forthcoming talks on open access through
self-archiving (April-May)
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 18:07:29 +0000 (GMT)
From: Stevan Harnad
Here are three forthcoming talks on open access through self-archiving (plus a related workshop):
Symposium on Scholarly Publishing and Archiving
on the Web University of Albany 7 April 2003.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: "Maximizing Research Impact Through
Institutional Self-Archiving"
Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting,
Pittsburgh PA 4 May 2003.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: "Author/Institution Self-Archiving
and the Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals"
International Association of Scientific,
Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers "Universal
Access: By Evolution or Revolution?"
Amsterdam, 15-16 May 2003.
INVITED ADDRESS: "Open Access by Peaceful Evolution"
International School of Advanced Studies
(SISSA) (with partial support of the European
Union)
Workshop on "Peer Review in the Age of Open
Archives" Trieste (Italy) 24-25 May
2003.
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org
See also:
The Budapest Open Access Initiative:
The BOAI Forum:
The Free Online Scholarship Movement:
The SPARC position paper on institutional repositories:
The free OAI institutional archiving software site:
LOC has announced in the OAI mailing list that the ZING Initative has created the SRW and CQL protocols for web research.
SRW ("Search/Retrieve for the Web") is a web-service-based protocol which aims to integrate access across networked resources, and to promote interoperability between distributed databases. SRW features both SOAP and URL-based access mechanisms (SRW and SRU respectively) to provide for a wide range of possible clients. It uses CQL, the Common Query Language, which provides a powerful yet intuitive means of formulating searches.
DSpace (tm) 1.0 Released
My brief look at the capabilities of this new addition to dlib software indicates that it is well designed to handle large university and enterprise commercial workloads. From the DB design (PostgreSQL 7.2) to the full time security and the built in workflow capability, this OSE product will be attractive to a wide range of large organizations.
DSpace includes structure capabilities for groups and subgroups, and the ability of documents to belong to multiple groups with different access limitations for each. At the top end, DSpace can join into federated supergroups. At first glance over the comprehensive documentation, these folks seem to have covered all the bases.
DSpace Links:
DSpace project Web site:
DSpace at MIT:
DSpace source code:
Documentation:
Here is the announcement from the OAI mailing list:
HP Labs and MIT Libraries are pleased to announce that version 1.0 of the DSpace institutional repository software platform is available for download, evaluation, and use.
DSpace is an open source digital asset management software platform that enables institutions to capture and describe digital works using a submission workflow module; distribute an institution's digital works over the web through a search and retrieval system; and store and preserve digital works over the long term. DSpace runs on a variety of hardware platforms, and supports OAI-PMH version 2.0.
MIT Libraries has deployed DSpace 1.0 in full production at MIT and is actively working with seven other institutions in the US, Canada and the UK to explore federation models and services that build on the DSpace platform. DSpace at MIT is a registered data provider with the Open Archives Initiative.
We'd like to thank Jeff Young and OCLC for the OAICat software, and the impressive and speedy support of its use.